It happens every day behind the scenes. Quest employees collectively create and safeguard a critical company asset: our data. We record and maintain data about our patients, our customers and our tests. Thousands of employees touch our data every day, creating an enormous amount of information, says Charry Schubert, Quest Diagnostics Manager, Enterprise Client Master Data. “With so many people collecting and maintaining our data, we need to be good data stewards.”“Imagine data flowing through our company like oil in a car,” says Diane Cervantes, Quest Diagnostics Manager, Enterprise Test Master Data. “We need pristine, quality data to serve our customers, just like a Mercedes needs high-quality oil to run smoothly. Data is our organization’s greatest source of value, and also our greatest source of risk.”Missing or corrupt data, like an inaccurate patient address, can reappear later on in another process and lead to serious problems in how we serve our customers. And as we launch new analytics and information services and products, clean data is more important than ever to provide vital insights for clients and patients.
“Our data is an asset that serves as the foundation for all of our insights, decisions, products and services.” - Alisa Pasciuto, Quest Diagnostics Executive Director of Data Governance
“It’s imperative that everyone who touches our data treats it as an important company asset, following our Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs),” says Quest Diagnostics Michelle Cunningham, Manager, Enterprise Patient Master Data. “To strengthen this asset, we’ve introduced a Data Governance Program, which will assign decision rights, processes and policies to optimize, secure and leverage our data.”Under the program, leaders from across the company participate on one of the three Domain Governance Committees that provide thought leadership for our patient, client or test data. The Domain Committees oversee our Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Governance disciplines that work in harmony together to create and protect a single, trusted source of “truth” for our patient, client and test data. Some of the key agenda items addressed by these committees include data quality and business process improvement initiatives.Being good data stewards may require us to make changes in our processes or procedures to ensure high-quality data, but our efforts will be worth it:
- Clients will have a consistent experience across the Quest Diagnostics network, despite where their work is performed.
- We will provide a better client experience with a single test catalog, report and bill.
- We will continue to stand behind our innovative and powerful clinical analytics tools that will enable our customers to navigate the healthcare industry.
- We will use operational analytics to help our own teams understand and serve the market better.
“Our data is an asset that serves as the foundation for all of our insights, decisions, products and services. These will only be as good as the underlying data that supports them,” says Alisa Pasciuto, Quest Diagnostics Executive Director of Data Governance. “We’re serious about bringing new products and ways of doing business to market, and along with that, we need to be serious about governing our data.”
